Thomas Ulrich Christiansen

My primary scientific contribution is to understand speech perception processes and thereby shed light on bottlenecks hearing impaired face in contrast to the typical hearing. For example, speech comprehension can be seen as a hierarchical process going from an acoustic representation in the brain to more abstract linguistic representations like phonetical and grammatical representation which eventually leads to speech comprehension. My job is to figure out why and where in this hierarchical process the chain comes off for the hearing impaired when it doesn’t for typical hearing people.

In addition, I spend a significant part of my time advising the William Demant Foundation with regards to applications for research projects.

I am fascinated with how sophisticated communication between humans is. You don’t have to be a professor – children have sophisticated speech communication too. I then realized just how much and how complicated the “machinery” in the brain is to make this work and how dependent we are on this – especially people with hearing loss need to push the machinery to its limits.

After several years at DTU as an academic and several years developing hearing aids at Oticon, I eventually got the chance in 2023 to work on a speech perception project with Emina Alickovic where I could contribute with my expertise.

I am motivated by the fact that I help people with hearing loss at the same time as learning new things about how speech is perceived.

It would be a dream come true, if we could figure out details about human speech processing that could allow us to suggest new and improved signal processing in hearing aids.

I share a sailing boat with three friends. I enjoy sailing with them.  I love to play tennis – playing for almost all my life I am still learning…

The simplest thing I do to recover is Yin-yoga, a quiet yet very mindful activity – I call it active sleeping.

Ever since I read Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction book “2001” I have been curious about and fascinated by artificial intelligence. In my lifetime development has gone from primitive chess computers to computers beating the world champion in 1996. Since then, development has accelerated and now we use AI as part of everyday life – like when we give voice commands to our smartphone.

Like our predecessors we stand on the shoulders of scientist of the past. I hope to see even closer collaboration between scientific fields to create even more synergistic progress to the benefit of everyday lives of both rich and poor.